Michael Llewelyn Davies
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Michael Llewelyn Davies (June 1900 - 19 May 1921) was the fourth (second youngest) son of Arthur and Sylvia Llewelyn Davies, and along with his brothers was the inspiration for J. M. Barrie's character Peter Pan. He was two years old when the character of Peter Pan first appeared as a toddler in Barrie's book The Little White Bird, four and a half years old when the stage play Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up debuted, and eleven when the novel Peter and Wendy was published.
The statue of Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, erected in secret overnight for May Morning in 1912, was supposed to be modeled upon photographs of Michael Llewelyn Davies at the age of six, dressed as the character, but sculptor George Frampton apparently used a different child as his model, leaving Barrie very disappointed with the result. "It doesn't show the devil in Peter," the writer said. Barrie became guardian of the boy and his brothers following the separate deaths of his father and his mother. He and Barrie remained very close as he grew up and went away to school, particularly after George (the eldest brother) died in combat in Flanders during World War I in 1915.
Llewelyn Davies attended Eton College, then Christ Church, Oxford. He dabbled in writing poetry. Shortly before his 21st birthday, he and his friend Rupert Erroll Victor Buxton drowned in the frequently flooded pools of the Sandford Lasher near Sandford-on-Thames. According to an obituary and other remembrances they had been "intimate friends" and "inseparable". The site of their death was well known as a drowning hazard, and reports that the two bodies were found clutching each other (some say they were tied together at the wrists) have led to speculation that the pair were lovers and died in a suicide pact. Based on the fact that Llewelyn Davies didn't know how to swim and Buxton did, and reports by witnesses who heard them struggling in the water, the coroner concluded that Llewelyn Davies had fallen in and Buxton had died attempting to save him. Barrie wrote a year later that Michael Llewelyn Davies' death "was in a way the end of me".
In the 2004 film Finding Neverland he was portrayed as a child by Luke Spill.
